Thursday, January 10, 2013

As a connoisseur of fine feline street photography, I'm totally down with Street Pussy, the UK-based Tumblr dedicated to the art of capturing cats on camera. The blog's creators, Yogi and Simon, recently opened up to me about how they started taking pictures of kitties, and also revealed their favorite cat photography moment, and just how they came up with that controversial name. Read on for more!On what inspired them to start a feline photoblog:The idea came about because Yogi's motivation for her fashion photography course was waning, and she wanted to find a subject that she was passionate about to start a more long term project. I suggested that since she liked cats so much (yet unfortunately can't have her own, due to our house rules/busy lifestyle), she should photograph cats on the streets - there are plenty around after all, and you can give them plenty of love and attention whilst getting the pictures. We were also inspired by one of our favourite photographers, Alec Soth (of the Magnum Picture Agency) who said, "If in your heart of hearts you want to take pictures of kitties, take pictures of kitties."On where they take their photos:Fortunately, the first time we went out looking for cats to photograph we found a really playful cat who was very photogenic, and that provided the motivation that we could make the concept work in real life. A few months later, we came up with the name and by then had enough material to start the blog, and it all snowballed from there. We try to photograph any cats that we see, but mainly we have to go looking for them in our free time - funny enough, we now tend to categorise areas depending on how good they would potentially be for cats; estates and suburbia are very good, rich and country areas not so much. Often when we're photographing cats in a new area people tend to be quite suspicious of us following the cats around, or lying down on the street to photograph a cat under a car - so that can be interesting! We began in Wales and then moved to London, so usually stick close by to where we live. London is so big, however, so we are gradually working our way around!

On the name Street Pussy:The name has been quite important to our identity, as it adds a certain edge to the blog that hopefully separates us somewhat from the many blogs of 'cute' cats out there (not that there's anything wrong with those blogs obviously, it's just been done a lot). Whilst many of our photographs are quite cute, we do try our hardest to make all of our pictures photographically interesting as well - being influenced by photographers such as William Eggleston and Rinko Kawauchi, in particular. We also largely draw on our photographic backgrounds - both having studied photography (Simon - Documentary Photography/Yogi - Fashion Photography) at the University of Wales, Newport (which is where we met).On their favorite cat photography moment:When we went cat hunting back at Simon's parents hometown in Hertfordshire, there are a lot of cats there and we were hoping to spot some. It was getting dark so we decided to use our Canon SLR caneras with big flashes, but unfortunately cats don't really do well with giant digital cameras (from experience), and they either hid or ran away. Anyway, we were on our way home when a blue flashing light went by and a police car sped up to us...the police officer got out of the car and stopped us. He began asking questions explaining that some of the local residents had seen flashing and thought were sussing the area out as thieves or potential burglars. The fact that we had to explain to this officer we were simply photographing cats was funny enough, we then showed him our cameras and he had a chuckle. He ran our names through their system as a formality, and we learned that day that perhaps photographing at night was not necessarily wise in small towns.

The duo have managed to photograph over 280 kitties in two years (their favorite shot can be seen above), and don't plan on stopping as long as there are cats to be snapped. Visit the Street Pussy blog, or follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for more of the finest felines around London Town, and beyond.